the less
exclusive modern spirit made itself felt, and, soaring beyond the city
bounds, it projected works of a genuinely public nature, not for the
benefit of this or that city, but for the entire country. Political
centralization, governmental unity, later on, made it possible to run
canals through different provinces, to establish barracks for troops
over broad stretches of territory, to build court-houses and prisons, to
reconstruct hospitals on new plans, and to open more extensive
exchanges, markets, warehouses and slaughter-houses. Public instruction
also had its imperious demands, and States were forced to sprinkle their
lands with school-houses of every grade, from the simplest asylums and
primary and secondary schools to special government institutions;
libraries and museums were founded to satisfy still other claims of
education. Then with the ever-increasing wants of a civilization, eager
for progress, in the presence of the important discoveries of science,
before the invasions of finance and the extension of governmental
machinery, architectural designs are indefinitely multiplied to supply
suitable departmental buildings, banking-houses, houses of commerce,
quarters for public officers and public boards, railway-stations, inns,
custom-houses and toll-houses; to say nothing of private residences and
play-houses, bathing establishments, casinos and villas, whose designs
change from time to time with the manners and customs of the period or
people.

Civil architecture, in the proper sense of the term, originated with the
Greeks and was extended in a surprising degree among the Romans. All the
other peoples of antiquity devoted themselves to the rearing of
religious and sepulchral monuments, and to the construction of palaces
for their sovereigns. Their political organization did not lend itself
to development in other directions. So long as a people is not
considered as an individual there can be no thought of erecting for its
comfort or education structures of any considerable importance; so long
as it has no existence as a civil body there can be no call for the
building of edifices wherein to discuss its own affairs or the affairs
of State. Nevertheless, aside from temples and palaces, there are
certain works of public utility which are forced upon all civilizations,
and among all organized peoples a domestic architecture exists which
answers to their needs and which we cannot pass over in silence.

The